Shades of Grey
by alcimines
Summary: Logan's been around - and some of the places he's been and the some of the things he's done have been pretty remarkable. Where do you suppose he was when President Kennedy was assassinated?


SHADES OF GREY

The basic plan was simple. The good plans always are.

Oswald was at a window on the sixth floor of the Texas Schoolbook Repository, Hale was behind a retaining wall on the Grassy Knoll, and Logan was stationed on a maintenance platform underneath the Triple Underpass. All three shooters were equipped with mail-order Mannlicher-Carcano carbines. The carbines were of reasonable quality, but weren't the kind of weapon anybody would associate with a professional assassin.

After Kennedy entered the Elm street kill-zone, Oswald would take the first shot. Standard Secret Service practice dictated that the driver of the President's car would accelerate forward and out of the immediate area as soon as he realized that they were under fire. However, there was nowhere for the vehicle to turn off the highway until after the car got past the Triple Underpass. So if Oswald missed his shot, Kennedy would still have to get past both Hale and Logan in order to escape.

From his perch underneath the Triple Underpass, Logan saw and heard everything. Oswald's first shot was a miss, which caused Logan to curse softly. However, Oswald's second shot - which was actually much harder than his first - went through JFK's neck. Logan saw it through the scope of his rifle and judged it to be a probable kill. The President would most likely die either of asphyxiation or from blood loss long before he reached medical aid.

As the presidential limo passed the Grassy Knoll, Hale confirmed the kill with a single shot that blew off a sizable part of Kennedy's skull.

Logan never fired a shot. He didn't have to, because after Hale's shot the main part of the mission was over. Logan ditched his rifle into the steel and concrete interior of one of the underpass columns. The rifle rattled and banged its way down to the foot of the column as JFK's car roared almost directly underneath Logan's perch.

Logan could hear Jackie Kennedy's hysterical screams and the curses and frantic radio-calls of the Secret Service men. He could even smell the President's blood.

* * *

As always, the afterwards was the tricky part.

"Rose?" Elaine asked quietly. Upon hearing her name, the dark-haired woman in the blue jacket turned to face Elaine. Rose had been standing directly across the street from the Grassy Knoll when Hale had finished off Kennedy. It was obvious from what Rose was hesitantly saying to other people that she had seen something suspicious.

"Do I know you?" Rose asked in surprise.

"My name's Elaine," the girl answered calmly and politely. She seemed very self-assured. "We've never met."

"How do you know my name?" Rose asked curiously. It didn't occur to Rose to be frightened of the girl. Elaine was very young - Rose's first thought was that she was probably still a schoolgirl - and she was a pretty blonde who was dressed modestly in a knee-length skirt and a long-sleeved blouse. Elaine just didn't look dangerous. That was one of the reasons Elaine was so effective as an agent.

"It doesn't matter," Elaine replied. Then she reached into Rose's mind and began to replace and reorder her memories.

The National Security Agency was years ahead of everyone else - even SHIELD and the KGB - in using psionic agents. It was one of the reasons that the US would eventually win the Cold War. At the moment, Elaine's job was to circulate through the crowd, identifying people who'd seen something that didn't agree with the "lone gunman" narrative that the assassins were establishing. She would then alter the memories of the witnesses into something more benign.

It wouldn't be perfect: there was always a certain amount of leakage in these situations. But it should be good enough and the post-op cleanup and disinformation team would smooth off any rough edges.

Once she was finished, Elaine let Rose go. The older woman blinked several times, looked at Elaine uncertainly - as if trying to recall who she was - and then walked away without another word.

Looking across the street, Elaine saw a Dallas motorcycle police officer standing on the edge of the Grassy Knoll. There was a frown on his face as he looked back and forth, from the road where the President had been shot to a retaining wall near the southern edge of the Knoll. The wall would have provided excellent cover for anyone shooting at the President's car. And as a matter of fact, it had done just that.

Elaine sighed. Then she carefully checked both ways - it wouldn't do to be run over by a police car - and then crossed the street and walked over to the policeman.

* * *

Hale was an ex-Royal Marines sniper. He'd long since gone bad and nowadays he was usually employed as a hit-man by the European organized crime cartels. Hale had murdered a lot of people in the last few years, but he had never worked in the Western hemisphere, so he was completely off the radar of the American law-enforcement and intelligence agencies. That was one of the reasons that he had been selected for this op.

Hale thought he had been hired by the Mafia.

Logan was leaning against their car - a nondescript, black, four-door sedan - as he waited for Hale. The car was parked almost a quarter-mile from Dealey Plaza, but Logan could still hear the uproar from the assassination. The blaring sirens of police and emergency vehicles stood out the most of course, but the sound mostly consisted of a long, drawn-out, unbelieving roar of thousands of people shouting, talking, questioning, and weeping.

Just as Logan started to worry, he saw Hale turn into the alleyway. Logan could tell that the Englishman was high on adrenaline. There was a manic grin on Hale's face and an energetic bounce in his stride. Logan understood what Hale was feeling. There was something about killing powerful and important people that made a man feel particularly alive.

Hale was carrying a medium-sized suitcase in his left hand. Unfortunately, there wasn't a good place to dispose of a weapon at the knoll, so Hale had to carry his carbine out with him. Hale hadn't been happy about that part of the plan - getting caught with the murder weapon was the classic amateur's mistake, but eventually he had agreed to do it. By dismounting the barrel from the receiver, the carbine could easily fit in a reasonable-sized suitcase.

Dropping a cigarette onto the bricks of the alley, Logan crushed it out with his heel as he watched Hale approach.

"Took you long enough," Logan growled at Hale as he opened the trunk of the sedan.

"It's a madhouse back there," Hale responded with a shake of his head. "And I didn't want to look like I was in a hurry."

Logan glanced around. The car was carefully parked in an alley between two warehouses. It wasn't exactly concealed, but it wasn't out in the open either. But at the moment, Logan could tell that nobody was watching them.

Hale tossed the suitcase into the open trunk. He was about to close the trunk when Logan put two bullets into the back of his head. The weapon was a silenced .22 caliber pistol. It wasn't particularly lethal, except at close range. However, the pistol had the advantage of not leaving much of a mess. That was important at the moment, since Logan didn't want blood, brains, and skull fragments scattered over the back of the car.

As Logan tossed Hale's body into the trunk, he found himself wondering how the hell someone as experienced as Hale could have ever thought that an undependable outsider like himself would be allowed to survive after a job like this.

* * *

As Logan dealt with Hale, and Elaine scrambled memories, an Army Intelligence team was busily scouring Dealey Plaza for vital clues, all the while thinking that they were gathering evidence rather than concealing it. If anyone questioned what they were doing, they immediately showed their credentials - which were carefully unspecific except to say the bearer was a Federal agent.

Eventually, Elaine would subtly alter their memories and the Army Intelligence team would remember nothing more than that they had been in the crowd at Dealey Plaza - taking a break from a training exercise and trying to catch a glimpse of the President like everyone else - when JFK was shot. They would remember that in the confused aftermath of the assassination, they tried their best to help the authorities. As a matter of fact, their determination to do their duty at such a terrible time would be a matter of quiet pride to all of them for the rest of their days.

* * *

Logan didn't think much of Lee Harvey Oswald.

For one thing, Oswald was an ideologue. Logan had seen that before. In fact, he'd seen it more often than he liked to remember. And Logan had long since figured out that kind of guy. To Oswald and his ilk, what they actually believed really wasn't that important. Instead, what was important was that their beliefs set them apart from others, thereby establishing their self-proclaimed intellectual and moral superiority over the common herd.

More subtly, Oswald used ideology as crutch. Oswald was able to tell himself that the real reason his life was a tremendous pile of shit was because of his lonely and courageous stand for Truth, Justice, and the Oswald Way. In other words: nothing was Oswald's fault. Yeah, he barely managed to avoid being thrown out of the Marine Corps, made a farce of his defection to the Soviet Union, was on the tail-end of a dying marriage, couldn't convince the Cubans to take him in, and the best job he could get was temp work counting and stacking boxes of school-books. But none of that was his fault. Instead, it was the fault of all those people - those sheep - who refused to see just how smart Oswald really was. They were the ones who were keeping Oswald down, and they were doing it because Oswald was brave enough to Speak Truth To Power.

But when you get down to it, guys like Oswald did have one interesting characteristic. Sometime in their mid-to-late twenties, they began to notice that the world wasn't acknowledging them. And that was when they got dangerous, because then they had to do something to prove they were actually as important as they thought they were.

That was what made Oswald useful. It was child's play to manipulate him into helping kill Kennedy - Oswald thought he was working for Cuba. And after the deed was done, Oswald would make a great fall guy.

There was another reason not to like Oswald. The ferret-faced bastard was a wife-beater. It was utterly typical of the man - as the world kept reminding Oswald that he was a nobody, he took his frustrations out the only person who thought she had to put up with his crap. Logan had met Marina Oswald once. She didn't deserve her husband.

Logan was disposing of the car - and Hale's body and weapon - in a Galveston junkyard when the radio in the junkyard's office reported that Oswald had been captured by the Dallas police. As Logan watched the vehicle compactor crush the car into a refrigerator-sized brick, he tried not to smile.

Oswald was never going to make it to trial. And like Hale, he was no loss.

* * *

_Five days after the assassination._

Kennedy, Hale and Oswald were all dead and Ruby was locked away. Kennedy was now a martyr, well on his way to secular canonization. Almost everyone on earth now knew Oswald's name - so in a way, Oswald was finally as important as he'd always wanted to be. And the crushed steel block containing Hale's remains was part of an artificial reef somewhere off the Texas coast. In a few years, he would only be remembered by a few puzzled European police officials who would occasionally wonder what had ever happened to that English contract killer.

The trail of evidence was now so mucked up that nobody would ever be able to figure out exactly what the hell had happened in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963. Oh, there would be suspicions - strong suspicions. In fact, some men and women would spend the rest of their lives obsessively trying to find proof to support those suspicions. But nothing was provable.

The Galveston Hotel was old, built just before the Depression. It had been a popular resort for many years, but it was finally showing its age. The room Logan and Elaine were sharing needed a paint job and the furniture was worn and tired. However, the bed was serviceable. And for the last two days, that had been good enough.

Two days ago, Elaine had walked into the room, kissed Logan, and then stripped naked. She hadn't left the room - or put on any clothes - since then. The two of them made love constantly and the sex was somewhere between great and frantic. Logan knew that Elaine was trying not to think too much, but he also knew that it was only a matter of time before she couldn't fuck her thoughts away.

Walking out of the bathroom, Logan saw Elaine sitting on an easy chair, looking out the open window that faced the sea. Fishing boats were slowly making their rounds out on the deep, blue water. It was a great view - both of the sea and of Elaine's slim, pale, body. She was blessed with flawless skin and a strong, athletic build.

Logan noticed that Elaine's face was expressionless in a way that you normally didn't see in someone as young as her. Still toweling water from his hair, Logan sat down in a chair facing Elaine.

"Wanna talk?" he asked quietly.

Elaine looked at Logan. Her smile was a little shaky, but it was there.

"You don't have to worry about me, Logan," she said. "I know we did the right thing. It wasn't pretty, and I wish there had been another way, but it was the right thing."

Logan tossed his wet towel across the room and said, "I hope you're right."

Elaine looked back out the window.

"I cheated and looked inside Angleton's head," she said softly, her eyes on the fishing boats. "He wasn't lying to us. The whole thing about the KGB blackmailing the President. The things they were making the President do. What might have happened if the Agency had gone public with what was going on. It was all true."

Logan tiredly ran his hands through his hair, slicking it back on his head. Actually, the exhaustion was more mental than physical. "Yeah. We've shut down something bad. Maybe even prevented a war. All in a day's work, I suppose. But..."

Logan didn't finish what he was saying.

Elaine looked back at Logan, "Hey, sweetheart, we're the best there is at what we do. And what we do isn't very nice."

Despite himself, Logan suddenly grinned. "Hey, I like the sound of that. I'll have to remember it."

Now there was something sad in Elaine's eyes.

"Yes, you remember that," she said quietly. Then she reached into Logan's mind and began to wipe clean the memories of what he had just been a part of.

* * *

_Fourteen days after the assassination._

James J. Angleton was trying not to be angry. The mission was done. He and his people might very well have saved the country and possibly the entire world. That should be more than enough to satisfy any man.

But when everything was said and done, Angleton was a spy - not a soldier. He understood that casualties happened, but he didn't feel it in his gut. And Angleton was having a hard time dealing with the report that he had just received.

He had lost somebody. Somebody valuable. And Angleton wasn't good at dealing with that sort of thing.

Hale, Oswald, and Ruby didn't count - they were expendable trash who were meant to be used and discarded. Logan was back with his CIA/NATO black-ops team, his memories scrubbed about what he had been doing for the last month. The same was true for the U.S. Army team that had done the evidence cleanup in Dealey Plaza.

Elaine was the only casualty of the mission.

"How did this happen?" Angleton asked tightly.

The NSA man sighed and raised his hands towards Angleton in an effort to appease him.

"The agents who were altering Elaine's memories were under strict orders not to probe too deeply into her mind," replied the NSA man. "Those were your orders, sir, and we didn't question them. As a result, our telepaths were operating with a degree of imprecision that's usually not present when they do that sort of thing. One of them explained to me later that it was like wiping an audio tape without being allowed to listen to the tape beforehand - or to even see the tape recorder. So they weren't 100% sure what they were doing. And as a result, they wiped too much of Elaine's memory - and did some other damage as well."

Angleton let out a sigh, "Precisely how bad is it?"

The NSA man shrugged warily, "She doesn't remember the last two years at all, sir. And she's completely lost her special abilities. We did some Zener card tests and she's scoring absolutely average."

"Is there any possibility that she'll recover?" Angleton asked thoughtfully.

The NSA man shook his head, "We just don't know, sir. Our special talent agents have never run into anything like this. However, she's not otherwise damaged. Elaine still has all of her faculties and she's fully capable of functioning normally in society."

Angleton slowly closed the personnel folder that was sitting on the desk in front of him. He had heard the plea in the other man's voice and understood what was being asked.

"Your people are absolutely sure that her memories of all recent missions are gone?"

"Yes, sir," the NSA man said with a vigorous nod.

"Kick her loose," Angleton ordered quietly. "Give her a cover as an accident victim with amnesia. I'll see that she gets a disability pension - we'll package it as an inheritance from a distant relative."

The NSA man stood up, relief obvious in his body language. "Thank you, sir," he said gratefully.

"She was a good agent," Angleton said with a regretful shake of his head. It was the closest that a man like Angleton could ever come to saying that he was sorry.

* * *

_Forty-three years, eight months, and two days after the assassination - and three days after Logan regained all of his memories._

There were advantages to being friends with a girl who could walk through anything.

Kitty stepped out of the interior of the Triple Underpass bridge column. A rusting, battered rifle was in her hands. Without a word, she handed it to Logan. He took the weapon and examined it. The scope was smashed and the wooden stock was cracked and splintered, but it was otherwise intact.

He had to strain to do it, but Logan managed to open the rusted bolt. A round popped free from the chamber and Logan expertly caught it in mid-air. The bullet looked shiny and new - as if it were fresh out of a just-opened box of cartridges.

It was well after midnight, but there was still some automobile traffic going underneath the Underpass. To her amusement, Kitty noticed someone slowing down and gawping at them as they examined the rifle.

Turning away from the guy in the car, Kitty glanced meaningfully down the street towards Dealey Plaza.

"You owe me an explanation, bub," she said firmly.

"Not yet," Logan told her. "Someday soon, but not yet."

Kitty accepted that. High on the list of reasons that Logan cared so much about her was that she knew when to wait.

* * *

_Forty-three years, eight months, and five days after the assassination - and six days after Logan regained all of his memories._

Elaine's tombstone read: "Elaine Grey, Loving Wife and Mother, 1943-2006". Her grave was right next to her husband's. Sara - Jean's sister - was buried in the next row.

Standing in front of Elaine's grave, Logan tried to make some sense of it all. He eventually met Elaine Grey again - when she was a gracefully late-middle-aged woman who he only knew as Jean Grey's mother. At the time, he hadn't remembered 1963. He hadn't remembered what he and Elaine had done together and what she had done to him. And as near as Logan could tell, she hadn't remembered him either.

Logan could guess what had happened. After she wiped his memory, someone else had done the same to Elaine. It made sense. The only part Logan wasn't too sure about was why Angleton would let a powerful resource like Elaine slip through his fingers. He wasn't the kind of guy who would let go of somebody who was that useful.

Logan shook his head. There were a lot of people in various intelligence agencies who were damn lucky that they were already dead. Angleton was one of them. And incredibly enough, he wasn't the worst of them. Not by a long shot. Hell, you could make an argument that the guy had saved the world.

Of course, the history books all said that Angleton went nuts in the end. The CIA eventually had to fire him to prevent Angleton from wrecking the agency with endless paranoid witch-hunts for Soviet moles. Then he more or less drank himself to death.

Was it possible that Angleton had been around the bend as far back as 1963? That thought raised some really uncomfortable questions that Logan didn't particularly want to deal with at the moment.

As Logan quietly pondered his past, Ororo put flowers on the graves of John and Elaine Grey. It was one of Ororo's African customs - she remembered a lost friend by honoring her parents and ancestors. So Ororo was a regular visitor to this graveyard. This time, she had been more than a little surprised when Logan had asked to come along, but she hadn't asked any questions.

After laying out the flowers, Ororo was silent for a moment, her eyes closed and her head bowed as she stood before the graves of her friend's parents. Logan waited until Ororo was done, then he fished a cartridge case out of his jacket pocket. It was a 6.5mm round from a Mannlicher-Carcano carbine.

Bending over, Logan used his thumb to drive the cartridge point-first into the hard soil of Elaine's grave.

"Rest, darlin'. And all's forgiven," Logan said quietly after he straightened up. "You - we - always did what had to be done."

Ororo watched without comment. And she held her peace until they began walking back to the car.

"Do you want to tell me what that was about?" Ororo finally asked.

Logan looked at Ororo and smiled grimly. "It's kind of a long story."

"I have time," Ororo said.

"Not as much time as I do," Logan replied wearily.

* * *

Notes: It's actually canon that Logan was in Dallas the day JFK was murdered - with a strong hint that his presence wasn't an innocent one. It was mentioned in passing in the the "Wolverine: Origins" series.

Elaine Grey is, of course, Jean Grey's mother. She, her husband, Jean's sister Sara, and other members of the Grey family were killed by agents of the Shi'ar Empire in an effort to eliminate the bloodline that produced the Phoenix.

This story will be anachronistic in just a few years. I'm assuming that Elaine was 20 years old in 1963. If Jean is (wherever and whatever she is) in her late twenties, then she was born when Elaine was well into her thirties. It works like this: if Jean's 28 years old, then Elaine was 36 when she gave birth to Jean - and 38 when she had Sara. That's possible, but we're already on the ragged edge of the time-line being plausible.

Please not that I do not for a split second think that JFK was - or ever would be - a traitor to his country. And even in the hysterical world of assassination theorists, James Jesus Angleton has never been accused of having been involved in JFK's murder. And for what it's worth, I believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone when he killed President Kennedy.


End file.
